Microsoft

Since the initial release of Salamander School Data Sync (SDS) in May 2017 there have been a few requests from customers for new features. This new version adds two of those features along with some minor bug fixes:

Support for reading the ‘Home’ Email address from SIMSPrevious versions could only read the ‘Work’ Email address from SIMS. This feature adds the ability to pull the ‘Home’ Email address instead.

Support for Progresso REST APIThis version adds support for Progresso’s REST API.

Fix for new SDS Profile ValidationFixed an issue where some sites were failing validation when trying to upload files to SDS.

Here’s a selection of training and professional development resources for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams for Education. Microsoft seems very focused on Teams as their preferred collaboration tool and are trying to integrate as many tools into it as they can. There are even indications that Microsoft is looking to migrate users from Skype for Business to Teams (see All About Microsoft for more details).

Since the initial release of Salamander School Data Sync (SDS) in May there have been a few requests from customers for new features. This new version adds two of those features:

Effective DateEffective Date is a process which allows the user to define the date on which the export processes run. During Holiday period’s it may be useful to set this to look at the student, teacher and class information at a particular date rather than the date of running the application.

This allows the utility to help the provisioning of SDS for new Academic Years and/or Terms before they start.

Toggle output CSV with missing detailsBy default the utility will output, to the CSV files, the details of every user it finds in the data from the MIS. This will include those without complete details which could cause sync issues with SDS. This version now adds the ability to, optionally, remove the details for any missing students/staff.

The new classroom experiences in Teams will help teachers manage their daily workflow more easily than ever before. Using Teams, they can quickly and efficiently create classes with automatically populated student rosters from their school information system; share files and teaching materials; make announcements; divide the class into project groups and monitor progress; create, distribute and grade quizzes; deliver personalized learning with OneNote Class Notebooks; and distribute, collect and grade assignments. And because Teams is a digital hub, students can work together anytime, anywhere, and on any device; teachers can connect with their peers and continue their own development in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs); and school administrators can communicate and collaborate with their entire staff.

From the image you can see that the tabs are similar to those in Microsoft Classroom.

Then education tenants started to get this message in their message centre.

We’re making some changes to Microsoft Classroom Preview

On July 31, 2017, we’ll discontinue support for the Microsoft Classroom Preview, as we work to unify our classroom experiences in Microsoft Teams in Office 365 for Education. Since the Microsoft Classroom Preview released, we’ve been very thankful for schools’ feedback from around the world; which has helped us improve benefits and features of the service. Ultimately, we learned to keep it simple and put classroom resources all in one place. We listened and we’re bringing the best of the classroom features (e.g., Assignments and OneNote Class Notebook) to Microsoft Teams in Office 365 for Education.

How does this affect me?

– Microsoft Classroom Preview will continue with current functionality until July 31, 2017. – Teachers will not be able to create new notebooks or assignments after the July 31, 2017. – Current classes and associated content will continue to be available as Office 365 Groups. Teachers can access assignment resources, files, calendars, and conversations, through tools such as Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint Online. If necessary, they can copy Class Notebook content to their personal workspace (e.g. OneDrive for Business). – When the new class experiences become available in Teams, School Data Sync will start creating the new classes for Microsoft Teams. SDS will continue to sync existing Microsoft Classroom Preview classes through July 31, 2017.

What do I need to do to prepare for this change?

We apologize for any inconvenience resulting from this transition. We encourage you to try out Microsoft Teams, and get yourself familiar with the Teams experience. Please click Additional Information to learn more.

So by July 31st 2017, Microsoft Classroom, which never got out of preview, will be discontinued, to be replaced by the education experience in Microsoft Teams. While this will be very annoying for those who have invested their time in trialling it, and using in their school – it does make sense. Classroom, although built on top of Azure Active Directory, was a very much standalone experience, and just for the education sector. Microsoft is heavily pushing Teams as part of Office 365 and so will be investing a lot in it. Hence adding the education functionality to it makes much more sense and will make it more likely to keep being updated as it’s part of a ‘core’ product.

We’ve yet to see what the assignment functionality is like, but my guess is that the Assignments tab will be very similar to Classroom, because it’s likely to be the same back end. One of the advantages of Teams is that the tabs are configurable and extendable, so anyone can develop new functionality in a tab, hopefully it should have just been a case of putting the assignments functionality in a new UI container.

On the administration side, both are powered by School Data Sync (SDS) and so no change is required and any time you have invested in setting that up is not wasted. So you can continue to create your classroom/team group using SDS whether it’s by manual csv upload, Salamander Active Directory or our new free SDS utility.